McAfee released its McAfee Labs Threat Report: December 2017, examining the growth and trends of new malware, ransomware, and other threats in Q3 2017. McAfee Labs saw malware reach an all-time high of 57.6 million new samples—four new samples per second—featuring developments such as new fileless malware using malicious macros, a new version of Locky ransomware dubbed Lukitus, and new variations of the banking Trojans Trickbot and Emotet. Threats attempting to exploit Microsoft technology vulnerabilities were very prominent despite the fact that the platform vendor addressed these issues with patches as early as the first quarter of 2017.
“The third quarter revealed that attackers’ threat designs continue to benefit from the dynamic, benign capabilities of platform technologies like PowerShell, a reliable recklessness on the part of individual phishing victims, and what seems to be an equally reliable failure of organizations to patch known vulnerabilities with available security updates,” said Raj Samani, McAfee’s Chief Scientist. “Although attackers will always seek ways to use newly developed innovations and established platforms against us, our industry perhaps faces a greater challenge in the effort to influence individuals and organizations away from becoming their own worst enemies.”
Each quarter, McAfee Labs assesses the state of the cyber threat landscape based on threat data gathered by the McAfee Global Threat Intelligence cloud from hundreds of millions of sensors across multiple threat vectors around the world. McAfee Advanced Threat Intelligence complements McAfee Labs by providing in-depth investigative analysis of cyberattacks from around the globe.
Mobile malware. Total mobile malware continued to grow, reaching 21.1 million samples. New mobile malware increased by 60% from Q2, largely due to a rapid increase in Android screen-locking ransomware.